I have already mentioned this blog post lamenting the use of PDF instead of HTML in an online journal:

In short, choosing to use PDF rather than HTML tends to make the content less open than it otherwise could be. That feels wrong to me, especially for an open access journal! One could just about justify this approach for a journal destined to be published both on paper and online (though even in that case I think it would be wrong) but surely not for an online-only ‘open’ publication?

It’s because it’s a real pain to add it to the Eprints software we use at USQ – you have to upload the HTML and all its images and so on one at a time.

If you’re using other repository software, at least the stuff that’s commonly used in a Australia, then you’re out of luck as most of it doesn’t handle HTML at all.

It would help for the Open Access community and repository software publishers to help drive the adoption of HTML by making OA repositories first-class web citizens. Why isn’t it easy to put HTML into Eprints, DSpace, VITAL and Fez?

To do our bit, we’re planning to integrate ICE with Eprints, DSpace and Fedora later this year building on the outcomes from the SWORD project– when that’s done I’ll update my papers in the USQ repository, over the Atom Publishing Protocol interface that SWORD is developing.